The UK Covid Inquiry has seen Boris Johnson come in for some heavy criticism, most notably because of his reported remark to senior advisors that the virus “was just nature’s way of dealing with old people”.

Read our report here 👈

However, might there have been sound logic behind his reasoning? Today, one of our readers leaps to his defence.

John Birkett of St Andrews writes:

"While Boris Johnson's language in cold print may now seem callous, it was his duty as Prime Minister to set priorities, and he was surely right to debate with colleagues and advisers whether in general the old, or the young and the economy, should be the main governmental concern.

Also, it is easy to condemn his alleged flip-flopping, but his top expert advisers also changed their minds as the pandemic progressed, for example (but not limited to) in first supporting the unfortunately-named herd immunity, whose effects might well have been positive or little different from allowing the old to die sooner.

Having inherited an apparently benign and so-called "post-Cold War" world in 1990, the West's leaders in politics, diplomacy, security, banking, business and academia, then inflicted the banking crash and lockdown on us all including the younger generations, and facilitated Putin's war after handing over our production and energy needs to him and other totalitarian regimes, thus creating a new anti-democratic axis and trashing our economies far more than the UK's central bank and short-lived government did in September 2022.

My generation, born in the Second World War or soon after, has enjoyed a better and more predictable peaceful life than its predecessors had or our children or grandchildren will probably experience. To have prioritised the younger generations' education, employment and welfare during the pandemic, albeit at our expense, would have been a perfectly reasonable policy.”